On Reality and Reference Frames:

...As I said once before, all reality, as humans understand it, is bound to some reference frame; if there is anything like an absolute and universal reality, that is accessible only to he who knows the mind of God, and all our seers have asserted that we have to rise above reason (mind, not fall below it, never!) to access that. In this very mortal, fallible, changeable world, there are, and will always be, very many kinds of reality: to a very large extent, reality is socially defined, and socially manipulated – the agents of manipulation being manifold - church and state and school and parenting and gossip and cinema and literature etcetra, etcetra. Thus for a long time in the country I have been living - it has been a reality that ‘bright’ students, especially if they are males, have to make a beeline for careers in engineering and medicine, while in contemporary Brazil you aren’t really somebody unless you become an international football star! My boss at the newspaper I worked for in early youth burnt this into my head: facts never ‘speak for themselves’; the art and craft of journalism is making facts speak the kind of truth that the reporter (or his editor) wants them to speak. Every statement, especially about human affairs, thoughts, feelings and relationships is a value-loaded statement: there is no such thing as a value-free fact. If I say a man is well-informed, I am conveying a value-judgment along with a fact, and I am doing the same when I call the man a know-all, though the value-judgment is different this time! So in this sense, it is quite valid to say that without mind there is no matter, no reality. And minds are very different; not only in the sense of weaker and stronger, but different in the way they apprehend and fashion sense-impressions and construct (or re-construct) reality, in things that they take deep interest in, in the values they attach to different things (so different, indeed, that what one man considers as the highest value in his life makes another man call him mad!), in the number and variety of stored impressions and ideas that they make use of to make sense of a new input, in the nature and intensity of their curiosity and creativity…